Pete Phillips

making 3-up handouts from beamer presentations

I use the latex package ‘beamer’ (with lyx) to create presentations for
various talks etc.

For a forthcoming conference I was asked by the organisers to create a
3-up pdf file similar to what Powerpoint users produce.

I struggled with pgfpages for a while, and even contemplated writing my
own pgfpages layout. However, common sense prevailed and I found the
pdfjam package.

So, once my presentation is ready,in the lyx preamble I add the
‘handout’ option to the class options in “Document/Settings/Document
Class” so it reads: 12pt, handout

Then in the Latex Preamble I add:

\\usecolortheme{dove}

and remove any ‘\setbeamertemplates’ which may conflict with a nice
plain layout.

I then export this as a pdf file with File/Export/PDF (pdflatex)

Open this in acrobat and it *should* be 1 slide per page.

To convert this to 3 slides per page, with a frame around each slide,
and the slides shifted to the left of the page (leaving the RHS of the
page for people to write notes/comments) use this pdfjam command: